A company is only as good as the employees who build it, and TheLadders is no exception. We're proud to have an extrordinary pool of talent in our New York office, and we’d love for you to get to know some of our awesome teammates who make TheLadders the leading job-matching service for career-driven professionals. Here's a quick Q&A with John Dombek.

Hi John! How long have you been with TheLadders?

I’ve been with TheLadders for about four months.

What is your official job title and what are your responsibilities?

My job title at TheLadders is Data Analyst. Up to this point, my primary responsibilities have been providing analytic support to our Consumer and Enterprise Marketing teams.

TheLadders team swims, bikes and runs together during the 2013 Aquaphor New York City Triathlon.

TheLadders is proud of its corporate culture, and rightfully so – the atmosphere is fun, creative, and high-energy, and employees are constantly offered perks ranging from catered lunches and happy hours, to myriad company events and sports teams. A dynamic start-up atmosphere is fantastic, but I consider the best aspect of TheLadders’ culture to be leadership’s support of goals and growth.

This support comes in many forms. Professional development is encouraged with relevant courses reimbursed and regular promotions from within, as well as personal and community development. TheLadders helped me with one of my personal goals recently, as well as a charitable group’s goals, through its support of a triathlon team that races in the Aquaphor New York City Triathlon each year. This year the race took place on Sunday, July 14, and among the athletes who braved the 1,500m Hudson River swim, 40k bike ride up the West Side Highway and 10k run in Central Park were 10 current and former employees of TheLadders.

The third part in a multi-part series about the "Lean UX" approach to product development at TheLadders.

We created the app because it was clear our customers needed an on-the-go solution for their job search. What was unclear was exactly how we could best deliver value to them. We had some hypotheses about that and did some quick tests – both on the jobseeker and the recruiter sides. These tests provided essential direction and built empathy around the specific beliefs, goals and challenges of the users our product was serving. But how to move forward?

Start with scenarios

Armed with a better understanding of users’ needs, it was time to take a stab at what the product would look like. This moment can be paralyzing, but I like to conquer it by designing scenarios. This means imagining what each screen would look like during a single complete session in which a typical job seeker uses the app. This approach helps you understand how each part of the system needs to be threaded together to create a simple experience from the user’s point of view. Once the broad strokes are established, I can circle back and consider the implications this has for the overall system, and what special conditions and states need to be considered.

Our native iOS mobile app went live on the App Store last week and was featured exclusively in TechCrunch on June 18th.

In just one week, the app has been downloaded more than 100,000 times, rising to the top ranks on the App Store and claiming the number-one spot in the “Free “and “Business” categories and joining the “Top 50 Apps” overall. It is a great achievement and testament to the hard work we put into developing our iOS app. Although dozens of career apps exist, none of them were built with the on-the-go job seeker in mind. We have designed a clean, intuitive interface to streamline the job-matching experience. As a result, our team was not surprised by the app’s first-week performance.

Our head of product, Ben Grohe, shares how we found a way to use multivariate testing during the app development process.

Soon after we started developing our first mobile app, we realized that we are now building “shipping software,” rather than a website or web services. There are fundamental differences between the two, which proved to be a big challenge for our team—particularly, given our desire to continue using best practices of agile and lean development.

Product development at TheLadders

Before I continue, allow me to quickly give you some background on how we develop products at TheLadders. We live and breathe agile and lean development day in and day out. If you haven’t read it already, my colleague Michelle wrote a great article about how we work in cross-functional teams in our company. If I had to sum it up, our mantras are:

Since moving back to a free model for employers last October, we have made it easier for them to post jobs on TheLadders, yielding a 116% year-over-year increase in Q1 2013. One of the features we offer is the ability to rate the applicants either a “Fit” or a “No Fit,” which improves the matching experience on both sides.

In assessing this selection process, my team and I reviewed more than 100 jobs from this year’s first quarter and analyzed the 4,242 applications received for those positions. Typically, our jobs receive an average of 14 applications but for the purpose of our study, we selected jobs that received at least 15. We needed a large sample size to better understand and identify differences in behavior, and to ensure that the results were statistically significant. So, what did we learn?

17% of the applications received a “thumbs-up” rating, meaning they were a fit for the job

39% received a “thumbs-down” rating and, therefore, were not a fit for the job

A company is only as good as the employees who build it, and TheLadders is no exception. We're proud to have an extrordinary pool of talent in our New York office, and we’d love for you to get to know some of our awesome teammates who make TheLadders the leading job-matching service for career-driven professionals. Here's a quick Q&A withRakib Azad.

Hi Rakib! How long have you been with TheLadders?

Just over two weeks.

Welcome aboard! What is your title at TheLadders and what are your responsibilities?

Sr. Manager of Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A). I will oversee the financial budgeting, forecasting, and analysis for the overall business, while also analyzing everything in between for key business insights.

The second part in a multi-part series about the "Lean UX" approach to product development at TheLadders.

Last time we met, I introduced the concept of "Lean UX", and discussed how we're putting it to work in the development of our mobile application. We got our arms around the core hypotheses, and did some quick tests with users. Next, we wanted to see how our concepts would shake out with recruiters - because after all, we can't make job seekers happy if they aren't hearing from the people who have the jobs.

The Meaning of "Team" (and why it's essential to Lean UX)

Before going further, please allow me a brief interlude on what it means to be a "team" at TheLadders. We work in a loose agile/scrum approach (more buzzwords!) - which essentially means that cross-functional teams take on a problem statement and solve them independently. While the size of the teams vary, they often follow this configuration: development team (3-5 engineers including Q/A), a scrum master (or tech lead), a product owner, a UX designer, and a Visual Designer. (Additionally, copywriters work across teams.) The scrum master, product owner and UX designer form a sort of trifecta of team leadership, but in general, the entire team collaborates around creating solutions.

Sean talks about getting "uncubed" with some of the most influential folks from NYC's technology sector.

I'll admit it, I love attending job fairs. Sure, it's an incredibly exhausting experience to talk to one person after another for several hours. However, if you thrive on interacting with others, it is also hugely stimulating. I've attended a number of job fairs lately looking for great engineers to join our team here at TheLadders.

Uncubed, which we attended Friday, is one of my favorites. It bills itself as something of an "un-job fair." I'm going to respectively disagree with them. Uncubed is everything I love about job fairs but taken up a notch. The energy level is higher. Perhaps it's the music, or the food, or the alcohol that flows freely. Maybe it's the electricity that is New York City and its citizens. Whatever it is, Uncubed feels different. Louder. Stronger. Faster. Better.